ss
enclosed them which was of unearthly peace. The stars began to show
themselves, and presently the two who waited found their faces turned
upward to the sky and they both were speaking in whispers.

"The stars look large here," The Rat said.

"Yes," answered Marco. "We are not as high as the Buddhist was, but it
seems like the top of the world."

"There is a light on the side of the mountain yonder which is not a
star," The Rat whispered.

"It is a light in a hut where the guides take the climbers to rest and
to spend the night," answered Marco.

"It is so still," The Rat whispered again after a silence, and Marco
whispered back:

"It is so still."

They had eaten their meal of black bread and cheese after the setting
of the sun, and now they lay down on their backs and looked up until
the first few stars had multiplied themselves into myriads. They began
a little low talk, but the soundlessness was stronger than themselves.

"How am I going to hold on to that second law?" The Rat said
restlessly. "'Let pass through thy mind only the image thou wouldst
see become a truth.' The things that are passing through my mind are
not the things I want to come true. What if we don't find him--don't
find the right one, I mean!"

"Lie still--still--and look up at the stars," whispered Marco. "They
give you a SURE feeling."

There was something in the curious serenity of him which calmed even
his aide-de-camp. The Rat lay still and looked--and looked--and
thought. And what he thought of was the desire of his heart. The
soundlessness enwrapped him and there was no world left. That there
was a spark of light in the mountain-climbers' rest-hut was a thing
forgotten.

They were only two boys, and they had begun their journey on the
earliest train and had been walking about all day and thinking of great
and anxious things.

"It is so still," The Rat whispered again at last.

"It is so still," whispered Marco.

And the mountains rising behind each other and beside each other and
beyond each other in the night, and also the myriads of stars which had
so multiplied themselves, looking down knew that they were asleep--as
sleep the human things which do not watch forever.

"Some one is smoking," Marco found himself saying in a dream. After
which he awakened and found that the smoke was not part of a dream at
all. It came from the pipe of a young man who had an alpenstock and
who looked as if he had climbed to